This is the kind of thing that makes Chandan Sen hit a conference room table with excitement: Imagine that a soldier loses a hand in battle and is fitted with a prosthesis, said the director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine and Cell-Based Therapies at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center.

In some cases, the soldier can use the prosthetic hand to grip a glass. But he can’t feel — he can’t tell if the glass is hot or cold, or how tightly to hold on.

But what if doctors could reprogram some of the soldier’s cells to grow nerve cells? Then those new nerve cells could work with the prosthesis and join the body’s existing nerve cells.

The soldier could grip and feel.

“This is a realistic dream,” Sen said. “It’s not fiction anymore.”

To prove his point, he walked to a nearby lab where a mouse had been fitted with a small reflective patch on its belly.

Daniel Gallego, a nanotechnology researcher, squirted a DNA solution on the patch. That solution and the patch tell cells on the mouse’s skin to become nerve cells.

That same process could one day allow amputees to regain feeling.

“I’m 47 now,” Sen said. “By the time I retire, I want to see these products on the market.”

In the past decade, the top medical-research institutions in the United States have begun opening centers for regenerative medicine — the science of growing cells, tissue and organs to replace or repair damaged ones. Much of that is possible with stem cells, which can grow into many different kinds of tissue.

The National Center for Regenerative Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland lists 53 programs nationwide doing research in the field. The largest are at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California-Davis. Others, including Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Duke, have strong programs, too.

There are more than 4,500 ongoing clinical trials involving regenerative medicine, said Gregory A. Bonfiglio, with California-based Proteus Venture Partners, which invests in the field. They range from tissue engineering, such as growing organs, to training specific cells to fight cancer.

“It’s a fundamental change in the way you treat disease,” he said. “We’re going to cure (cancer).”

Ohio State opened its center in 2012 after consultation with Case Western’s, Sen said. The centers try to complement each other’s work without duplicating.

Ohio State’s advantage is that it has so many kinds of expertise in one place, Sen said. He said regenerative medicine needs input from different fields to advance. For example, engineers can help build the scaffolding for tissue to grow on, and dentists can advise on how a partially regrown jaw could work in a patient.

Seven schools in the university are involved with the center: medicine, engineering, pharmacy, dentistry, arts and sciences (with its chemists and physicists), nursing and veterinary medicine. More than 200 faculty members are involved in the research.

Funding comes from the university, outside industry that could sell the products being developed, and the state and federal governments. The U.S. military and related agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the field to develop treatments for wounded service members.

Dr. David Dean, an associate professor of plastic surgery at Ohio State, is using a grant from the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine to grow bone to repair cranial damage.

Dean said he wants to use 3-D printers to create a scaffold for stem cells to grow on. When the bone is finished growing in the lab, it can be implanted directly into patients’ heads. The scaffold would disappear, leaving just bone, he said.

“We’ve put lots of cranial implants in patients (in the past), but not ones that are reabsorbed,” he said.

Dr. Gail E. Besner, chief of pediatric surgery at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and a professor at Ohio State, is growing sections of small intestine to be used in children and adults who have life-threatening bowel conditions.

Beyond the ready availability of the intestines, patients who have the transplants won’t have to worry that their bodies could reject them, because the intestines will have been grown from their own cells.

“It’s revolutionary,” Besner said of regenerative medicine.

That’s the kind of word that people in the field often use. In the history of tissue replacement, almost all of the advances have come in trying to move living tissue from one place to another, said Dr. Michael Miller, the chairman of the department of plastic surgery at Wexner Medical Center.

Miller describes himself as an “end-user” of regenerative medicine. For the first time, doctors are seeing advancements in how they can manipulate tissue — growing it for a specific purpose, fitting it exactly where it should go.